The Tree of Idle Contemplation

Thu, 07 Dec 2017

By Taylor Hitchcock

Those inhospitable wastes house the soul of the world, arid and vast, indeterminately shifting towards desolation. Peaceful in its encroaching environmental doom. The desert. A decided fate, but not so hopeless as it seems, as a decided fate holds truer to hope than the vague aspirations of an individual human. Less perverted, as oppressive as it is freeing. A tree. To go there, out into that place, is to admit that you are lost. Not to say that those who live in such conditions are lost, those who live in a such a way are the suitors to vitality itself. No, I speak of those invasive foreigners who pursue myth and dream. Those who enter and who are lost, pulled towards their desired unknown. Barren, isolated. These terminal tourists are both cowards and seekers. They run from the multitude of beasts that tear them to shreds each day, and from the machines that reformulate them back into their tired and pained husks. They seek serenity. The appearance of death, the violence of life. So they wander out into the cradle of vacant gods and embrace the consuming sands. If they have luck and wit, they move from border to hamlet, following the shifting trails from water to water. If not, they are spit out as diseased phlegm, back into the fanged vortex from which the came. A pheromone veil hanging in the air. To reach the heart of the desert is no trite task accomplished, indeed, it only opens itself up to those seekers who have themselves fully opened up their hearts to it and its stretching flat, and pale ground. The ambrosia of calm. Its nights are starless, it days are blinding. To find the object so desired is to wade through a river of dark, pulled by causeless currents of which one is powerless to resist. The warmth of idles, the smooth flowing of thought. And finally, they find it, a tree at the base of a great red mountain. There they are free, and there they stay. Those moments are peaceful, with all of their living wounds finally healed. There they sit and think, wonder and contemplate, all that they can and all that they would wish. Melting into the world, slipping into the material stream. The locals have name the tree the Tree of Idle Contemplation, and has existed since time immemorial, and it feeds off of those wandering fools. To be eaten.

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